The group of 1,400 terrified officials, their wives, mistresses, flunkies, and Nazi “protectors”—including Céline, his wife, their cat, and an actor friend—attempt to postpone the postwar reckoning under the constant threat of air raids and starvation.

    Moving from the drawing rooms of pre-war Paris to the lives of men and women in wartime France, here we find the beautiful work of a writer at the height of her tragically short career.Contents:Dimanche = Sunday --Les rivages heureux = Those happy shores --Liens du sang = Flesh and blood --Fraternité = Brotherhood --La femme de don Juan = Don Juan's wife --Le sortilège = The spell --Le spectateur = The spectator --Monsieur Rose = Mr. Rose --La confidente = The confidante --L'inconnu = The unknown soldier.

    Read together, they give us an extraordinary depiction of sexual mores. When the apparently angelic Thérèse commits murder, she offers sexual favors to a petty clerk if he will dispose of the body; the pregnant Flavie manipulates a neighbor’s interest in her dowry to arrange a shotgun wedding; and churchgoing women find their hunger for Christianity unsatisfied by a vapid priest. These are beautiful and poignant stories unified by the powerful themes of deception and discontent.

    His epigrammatic and, above all, discomforting monologue gradually saps, then undermines, the reader's own complacency.

    More than a tale of possession, the novel probes disturbing depths of guilt, paranoia, and sexual obsession with an unsparing detachment.

     Too young to fight, Thomas assumes a noble ancestry, adds a few extra years to his age, and becomes a soldier. In this guise, he meets the society star Princess de Bormes and her impressionable daughter Henriette. While the princess pursues charity work with the wounded, Henriette falls in love with Guillaume. However, Guillaume, resplendent in army uniform and issued with a shiny revolver, is lost like a child in a fantasy land of their own creation. At the novel's denouement, he clings to his imposture, but in mind, if not body, he has grasped the real meaning of war. This visionary novel is a "hymn to the cult of youth" in which World War I battlefields become an exaggerated spectacle where fiction and reality are inseparable.

    Three long stories that draw the reader into the lives of three women, all past their first youth, all facing unexpected crises.

    But despite its masterly control, this startlingly modern tale is also a simmering, rebel cri de coeur unleashed by a writer who was herself unappreciated in her own time. The combination of these attributes make this edgy novella a moving and suspenseful homage to the power of literature itself.The Art of The Novella SeriesToo short to be a novel, too long to be a short story, the novella is generally unrecognized by academics and publishers. Nonetheless, it is a form beloved and practiced by literature's greatest writers. In the Art Of The Novella series, Melville House celebrates this renegade art form and its practitioners with titles that are, in many instances, presented in book form for the first time.

    The literary critic Roland Barthes dies—struck by a laundry van—after lunch with the presidential candidate François Mitterand. The world of letters mourns a tragic accident. But what if it wasn’t an accident at all? What if Barthes was . . . murdered?

    Gamelin's ideals lead him to the most monstrous mass murder of his countrymen, and the links between Gamelin and his family, his mistress and the humanist Brotteaux are catastrophically severed. This book recreates the violence and devastation of the Terror with breathtaking power, and weaves into it a tale which grips, convinces and profoundly moves. The perfection of Anatole France's prose style, with its myriad subtle ironies, is here translated by Frederick Davies with admirable skill and sensitivity. That The Gods Will Have Blood is Anatole France's masterpiece is beyond doubt. It is also one of the most brilliantly polished novels in French literature.Anatole France was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1921.

    Set in Dublin during the 1916 Easter rebellion, it tells of a nubile beauty who finds herself trapped in the central post office when it is seized by a group of rebels. But Gertie Girdle is no common pushover, and she quickly devises a coolly lascivious strategy by which, in very short order, she saves the day for king and country. Queneau's wickedly funny send-up of cheap smut—his response to a popular bodice-ripper of the 1940s—exposes the link between sexual fantasy and actual domination, while celebrating the imagination's power to transmute crude sensationalism into pleasure pure and simple.

    Stendhal narrates a young aristocrat's adventures in Napoleon's army and in the court of Parma, illuminating in the process the whole cloth of European history. As Balzac wrote, "Never before have the hearts of princes, ministers, courtiers, and women been depicted like this...one sees perfection in every detail."With beautiful illustrations by Robert Andrew Parker.

    Underlying this libertine fantasy is a profound meditation on contemporary life: about the secret bond between slowness and memory, about the connection between our era's desire to forget and the way we have given ourselves over to the demon of speed. And about "dancers" possessed by the passion to be seen, for whom life is just merely a perpetual show emptied of every intimacy and every joy.

    The Erasers, his first novel, reads like a detective story but is primarily concerned with weaving and then probing a complete mixture of fact and fantasy. The narrative spans the twenty-four-hour period following a series of eight murders in eight days, presumably the work of a terrorist group. After the ninth murder, the investigation is then turned over to a police agent, who may in fact be the assassin.Both an engrossing mystery and a sinister deconstruction of reality, The Erasers intrigues and unnerves with equal force as it pull us along to its ominous conclusion.

    It starts on the night of January 29, 1690, a ten-year-old boy abandoned -- the stern men who've kept him since infancy have wearied of him. The boy wanders, barefoot and starving, through a snowstorm to reach a gibbet bearing the corpse of a hanged criminal. Beneath the gibbet is a ragged woman, frozen to death. The boy is about to move onward when he hears a sound within the woman's garments: He discovers an infant girl, barely alive, clutching the woman's breast. A single drop of frozen milk, resembling a pearl, is on the woman's lifeless breast...